HOMESTEAD, Fla. — Jimmie Johnson and Chad Knaus never slowed down enough to consider what a record-tying third consecutive championship would mean to their legacy.
Don’t count on them doing it now.
After tying Cale Yarborough’s 30-year mark as the only driver with three straight championships, Johnson and his crew chief were already thinking about going after No. 4.
“I could go race again next week and start the season and go for four,” Johnson said after Sunday’s finale at Homestead-Miami Speedway. “It’s on our minds. It’s not that we’re chasing a number, we just know what we’re capable of. We know we can do better. It’s a search to do the best we can.”
Knaus, the first crew chief in series history to win three straight, even offered to report to work Monday morning to start their pursuit.
He was only partly kidding.
“We want four. Why not? That’s why we’re here,” Knaus said. “We can definitely bid for four. Give me a reason why not.”
Carl Edwards could offer a reason or two after winning Sunday’s race — his series-best ninth victory of the season — only to fall 69 points short of wresting the Sprint Cup trophy away from Johnson. Edwards led a race-high 157 laps, and won despite running out of gas as he crossed the finish line.
Johnson won the title by finishing 15th.
“We won more races than Jimmie (seven), and we ran with him when he won,” Edwards said. “I know they’ll enjoy this championship, but they knew we were here.”
Indeed they did, constantly looking in the rearview mirror as Johnson chased Yarborough’s mark.
Yarborough won his three titles 30 years ago, under a different scoring system and in a very different NASCAR. He accomplished his feat when drivers scraped together the cash they needed to race, and the champion was the guy on top at the end of a long season.
Johnson’s titles have been won in the glitzy new Chase to the championship format, where the best 12 drivers compete over a 10-race sprint to the title.
Johnson and his Hendrick Motorsports team have mastered the system, proving themselves unbeatable in their pursuit of Yarborough’s mark. They’ve won their titles with consistency — he finished outside the top 10 just twice in this Chase, a 15th-place finish at Texas — and by winning eight of the last 30 Chase races.
They’ve also gotten very rich along the way: Johnson has won more than $2 million in the 10 Chase races this year. Yarborough earned a combined $1.63 million in all three of his championship seasons.
